[In the following essay, Aitken discusses the relationship between Exiles and Joyce's Ulysses.]

James Joyce's play, Exiles, is clearly an additional exploration of the situation which confronts Stephen Dedalus at the beginning of Ulysses. Its hero, like Stephen, has just returned from his self-imposed exile, presumably prepared to forge the uncreated conscience of his race. He is now faced with the problem of reconciling his hard-won freedom and the conflicting necessity that he continue to live among men, to communicate with them, and to act upon them. Exiles focuses exclusively upon this situation, sharpening it dramatically by posing Richard between the poles of his stern ideal and his sharp yearning for union with his wife and friends, and expressing it in his curious aspiration for total union in utter nakedness.

This theme, and the nature of the hero, clearly relates the play to Joyce's other works. The relation is extended and made more secure by a careful association, with the themes and characters, of Joyce's familiar symbols: the woman who confronts Richard, for instance, is identified with the woman confronting the hero elsewhere by the use of the moon-goddess and earth symbols, the possibility of fertility is represented by the sea and by rain, and so on.¹ Joyce's notes to the play, published in 1951,² further secure these connections. My own reading of Exiles, however, has convinced me that the symbols and suggestions with which it is packed are more than simple tags and clues to its place in the Joyce canon; I think, indeed, that they fall naturally into dramatic patterns which carry the main burden of thematic exposition. It is to these patterns—to these “submerged dramas” in Exiles, as it were—that I shall turn my attention in this paper.

Exiles is certainly susceptible to a number of legitimate readings, at several different “levels of understanding.”³ From one point of view, for instance, it stands as a coherent and affecting portrayal of the tragedy involved for human beings who love, and must endure, a saint. Considered in its historical context, it is a partial replaying of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken⁴—if we believe that Bertha's breaking free from her husband's idea of her, at the end, constitutes a victory for her (it is a Pyrrhic victory, at best). I would suggest—without claiming, of course, that by doing so I exhaust the possibilities of so intricate a work—that two themes, developed in the “patterns” of which I have spoken, carry the burden of Joyce's meaning. The most comprehensive reading of the play must recognize these themes: the theme of the artist vis-à-vis his native land, and the theme of the (artist's) spirit seeking embodiment through union with others. Each of the play's protagonists is represented, through the use of carefully placed symbols and suggestions, by an archetypal personality: Richard is spirit, Bertha fecundity, Beatrice intellect, and Robert body, for instance. In the drama of the artist versus Ireland Richard's “archetype” stands pitted against those of his wife and friends all together, and in the second drama there is a four-way struggle in which each strives to retain his integrity and yet achieve union.

These two dramas are both, in themselves, archetypal. They have come into being because Richard has come home determined, finally, to act. His situation is itself outlined with great care, and emphasized to the point of abstraction, so that, although it may be compared with the situation in which Stephen finds himself in Ulysses, it is in fact somewhat different, and far more sharply drawn. Richard is made to express his concept of the artist's necessary integrity in metaphysical terms, an extravagance which must puzzle those who imagine they are reading a play as “naturalistic” as this one seems on the surface. His faith in his mission is far closer to the arrogant faith shown by the Joyce of 1900 than it is to the gentler Stephen's aloofness in Ulysses; this is appropriately signalled by the “imitation” of Ibsen, whom the young Joyce worshipped and upon whom he had modelled his own image.⁵ On the other hand, Richard is endowed with a wife and son, as Joyce was when he wrote the play, so that the problem of human relations is immediately pressing on him, as it was not for the isolated Stephen. The statement of the conflict in terms of an impossible adultery is another device for emphasis. The total effect is stark, the situation archetypal.

The four-way conflict with his wife and friends which grows out of this situation is the first with which I shall deal. The four archetypes engaged in it are indicated as such in a number of ways. Richard, to begin with, is a writer without an audience, and a potential leader without a voice (he has no position in Ireland, and his books, significantly, do not sell (38). Currently sleeping alone (96), he is thus, effectively, divorced from his wife. Robert Hand is a writer with an audience (to which he could introduce Richard if Richard would let him), but the futility of his idealism, emphasized by the comical terms in which it was presented, and his desire to be led by his friend, signals his essential mindlessness. He, too, is effectively rendered infertile, by his isolation from Bertha and his habit of having recourse to prostitutes. Bertha is “formless” (Joyce's word for her, in the Notes, 118), and lost, and she appeals in vain to the shaping spirit of her husband for guidance. Beatrice's timidity has isolated her from Robert (29-30), while her weak, feminine love for Richard alienates him; the emotional Bertha, suspicious of her intellect, holds her at a distance.

The protagonists' names, like most of Joyce's names, are revealing. Robert Hand's designates the manipulator (“Robert” recalls a friend whom Joyce knew in Trieste).⁶ Bertha's sounds like earth, hearth, Hertha, and birth. Beatrice Justice's first name reminds us that Richard wills to recreate her, as Dante did his lady, while “Justice,” less directly denotative, suggests the straight and narrow, and her hyper-dedication to her religion and her “duty.” Richard, as the central figure, seems not to have been tagged, unless his name recalls the kings and crusaders who held it before him. It is worth remembering, however, that his counterpart in the earlier books had a doubly significant name, and we may note that “Richard Rowan,” like “James Joyce,” alliterates.

Richard is an “automystic,” Robert an “automobile,” and Bertha “the earth, dark, formless, mother” (Notes, 113, 118). The darkness with which Robert is regularly associated links him both with Bertha and Richard. In his adultery scene, with the “dark, formless” woman, he muses, “The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved—loved and possessed” (87). His darkness also suggests the absence of Richard's illumination. The two darknesses come together at Ranelagh. Robert has turned down the lamps until the room is lit only by the false pink glow of his night-light. Rain is falling outside, and the wind is blowing, banging the front gate. Bertha, obscurely afraid, wonders if the sound she hears is Richard returning, and it requires little imagination on our part to make the semantic connection of wind with spirit. When a gust blows the lamp into sudden brightness (signalling Richard's intention to see and know all), Robert and Bertha instantly react to it, and Robert finally turns it out (87-88).⁷

The darkness comes to stand for Robert's guilt. In a scene in which Archie (apparently casually) discusses cows and robbers with his father, the little boy asks “How could a robber rob a cow? … In the night, perhaps,” and his father, whose mind is running on Robert's theft of his wife, replies, “In the night, yes” (47). Sitting with Richard, in the first act, and nervously conscious of his covert relationship to Bertha, Robert mops his brow and says, “Good Lord, how warm it is today! The heat pains me here in the eye. The glare.”

RICHARD:
The room is rather dark, I think, with the blind down but if you wish …
ROBERT:
quickly. Not at all. I know what it is—the result of night work.”

(37)

“I told you that I wished you not to do anything false and secret against me … not to steal her from me craftily, secretly, meanly—in the dark, in the night—you, Robert, my friend,” Richard says, and Robert admits a little later that he has “acted in the dark, secretly” (69-70). At the play's end Richard reads the article his friend has written about him, an article intended to be friendly, which Robert turned out very late at night; he interprets it as another act of betrayal. It can hardly be a coincidence, finally, that Robert twice asks for a match in a scene (44) in which he is groping, in vain, to understand Richard's meaning.

Robert is earth-bound, and his direction is down. Like Leopold Bloom, who is a “water-lover” (Ulysses, 655), Robert finds water congenial; Richard, on the other hand, is a hydrophobe like Stephen (witness his restless wandering by the sea he will not enter, the sea which is one of his wife's symbols, in Exiles' last act, page 109). “Can you swim well, Mr. Hand?” Archie asks, to which Robert replies, “Splendidly. Like a stone” (27). He will be submerged in the element which Richard avoids entirely; each, thus, is excessively oriented in his particular direction. Caressing an ornamental stone on a table in the Rowans' parlor, Robert illustrates his contention that a woman is to be loved as a thing of nature, but in Richard's presence he admits that he feels “too natural, too common” (41). He points out in several places, in fact, that he considers love to be “brutal,” because “affection between man and woman must come [to sexual intercourse]” (65), and that is “brutal, bestial, what you will” (63). In his euphemistic, aesthetic ramblings, Robert sometimes chances upon the symbols which refer to the elemental Woman:

You passed. The avenue was dim with dusky light. I could see the dark green masses of the trees. And you passed beyond them. You were like the moon. … In that dress, with your slim body, walking with little even steps. I saw the moon passing in the dusk till you passed and left my sight.

(31)⁸

In the next lines, though he seems to be talking utter nonsense, the symbols are again present:

To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea. … Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death.

(35)

This aside, he will talk frankly of “how her body develops heat when it is pressed, the movement of her blood, how quickly she changes by digestion what she eats into—what shall be nameless” (42).⁹

Passion represents a different sort of death for Richard: it is the “death of the spirit” (68). The Christian phrase is interesting. Richard is not a “Christ figure”; he is, indeed, not even a Christian, but the suggestions of sainthood and Christlikeness, recurrently applied to him, amplify his isolation and make it more stark. He catechizes those around him much as a confessor would. Insisting that she accept all of the terms he imposes on her, he is stern and infinitely patient in probing the wounded Beatrice. When she “fails,” at first, he shows the impersonal anger of a priest, and no more. Pointing out, with a perplexing frequency, that it is he who has suffered the most, and that his suffering has been for others, he echoes Christ. Richard regards his friends as disciples, and it is in the light of this that we must see his interpretation of his friends' failure to attain the goals he has set them as “betrayal.”

ROBERT:
… I have faith in you, the faith of a disciple in his master.
RICHARD:
There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master.
ROBERT:
And that is?
RICHARD:
The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him.

(44)¹⁰

Richard seeks “to give … a new life” to Bertha and Beatrice (67), a “new life” of “freedom” strikingly like that offered by Christianity: it must arise from absolute submission to Richard's standards, and out of it will develop an absolute, metaphysical “union.” This is beyond “human” comprehension, as Bertha indicates by the savagery of her attempt to reject it (52). When she cries “Woman killer!” (103) she suggests that, like the love of Apollo, it may be beyond human endurance.

The savior seems, now and then, to forget his own humanity, as when he tells Robert that “like all men you have a foolish wandering heart” (61). Richard is often enough aware of his human nature, however, and feels it as an encumbrance. Compassion, the sign of a link with ordinary, erring mankind, is weakness:

RICHARD:
I told you [Robert] that when I saw your eyes this afternoon I felt sad. Your humility and confusion, I felt, united you to me in brotherhood.
ROBERT:
… It was noble of you.
RICHARD:
No. Not noble. Ignoble.

(69)

He castigates his nature savagely, as if in crucifixion: “I have wounded my soul for you [Bertha]—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt” (112). Richard utilizes his jealousy, which rises without his consent, to chastise that part of him which could be jealous: he holds “in [his] own power the hindrance, the difficulty which has excited it, [and] it must reveal itself as the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love” (Notes, 114). His “carnal” betrayal of Bertha in Italy, with its attendant shame and sense of disgrace, I interpret to have been an effort on his part at self-humiliation. Confessing to her, he punished himself and, as significantly, broke her heart.

Richard's battle is not only with the earthiness of those he seeks to save, but also with the tatters of warmth and weakness he finds in himself. His humanity clings to his spirit as St. Anthony's did to his, and is manifested by his affection for his son and for his friends, for instance. His insufficiency is manifested in such doubts as those which arise from the discoveries he seems to make of his wife's innocence, a quality he had not perceived before. These things appear to me to show that there are “instincts” in him driving him towards the union with others which he must achieve; they indicate, I think, the impossibility of the sanctity he seeks.

Bertha, on the surface a rather girlish person, is the woman figure of passion and darkness and water. She is clearly the earth which receives the seminal rain in the adultery scene. Female and natural, she requires, of course, the natural male which Robert represents, but she also as urgently requires Richard's spirit. Joyce amplifies this second feminine need in his notes to the play: “It is a fact,” he says, “that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister …” (Notes, 120). The passage beginning “She is the earth, dark, formless, mother” continues,

made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with [Richard, clearly, is not aware of his immunity]; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence. Her tears are of worship, Magdalen seeing the rearisen Lord in the garden where he had been laid in the tomb.

(118)

Should she overwhelm Richard, as the earth overwhelmed Michael Furey and the sea of passion apparently does Robert, she would kill him, and it is this that Richard fears. She must worship him, however, for he is the shaping spirit she requires. Bertha needs Richard's soul and Robert's body, and she strives to bring them together into one person. It is a submerged perception of this, then, which underlies Richard's remark to her, “You have drawn us near together. There is something wiser than wisdom in your heart” (75).

She is aware of her role, as we may gather from her proud retort to Beatrice, “I made him a man” (100). She, in her incarnation as Gretta Conroy, buried Michael Furey, but Shelley (Richard) arose again. We recall “grave or womb” and its suggestion of rebirth, and must conclude that the death of the spirit which Richard fears, by water, would be only a ritual death after all, one which would bring about the vitalization of all of Exiles' people.

The story of the artist vis-à-vis Ireland may be read in much the same way. Ireland was gradually to lessen in importance, for Joyce, as his vast tale spread out to encompass all of time and all of space, but it always served as his stage. Stephen, who became Richard, was nationalistically oriented, and the Irish background is appropriate in this play. Joyce indicated it with great care.

Richard, in the Irish drama, is the nation's “spirit” in exile. He is compared to Swift and Parnell in the play and in the notes. Robert, his other self, is the typical, self-conscious Irish intellectual, busy but futile. Bertha stands as a kind of Irish mother figure, Beatrice is the nation's Protestant half, and Richard's parents are two Irish “types.” The fishwoman is the epitome of the general mass of Ireland.

Robert Hand is the Irishman of the musical comedy posters, cheerful, awkward, stocky and middle-aged; that fact struck Richard when he made his first break with his country, and could view it from above: when he left the church, Joyce notes, “he met many men of the same type as Robert” (Notes, 117). His desire to be led by Richard reflects Ireland's essential, aimless restlessness, and his inability to follow a savior of this particular sternness is shown in his failure to understand his friend's critical innuendoes. Instead, he simply regards Richard's saeva indignatio with uncomprehending awe: “with animation: You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift” (43). Joyce obliquely notes his futility, sometimes with humor, as when Robert declares, “The man who drinks black coffee is going to conquer Ireland. And now,” he says affably to Richard, “I will take just a half-measure of that whiskey … to show you there is no ill feeling” (43). Archie asks his father, “Are there robbers here like in Rome?”

RICHARD:
There are poor people everywhere.
ARCHIE:
Have they revolvers?
RICHARD:
No.
ARCHIE:
Knives? Have they knives?
RICHARD:
sternly. Yes, yes. Knives and revolvers.

(47)

The father, who had for a moment been reading the surface meaning of his son's words, has suddenly seen them in the light of his brooding suspicions of his friend, and connected “thief” and “here” (Ireland) with Robert. The cows, in this deceptively innocuous discussion, may be linked with Ireland through the phrases in Ulysses about the milkwoman: “They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times” (Ulysses, 15); the milkman, Archie tells his parents, will let him drive when they get into the country “where there are no people” (46). Robert's nationality is always, restlessly, in the back of Richard's mind: “A liar, a thief, and a fool! Quite clear! A common thief! What else? With a harsh laugh. My great friend! A patriot too!” (51).

“Welcome back to old Ireland!” Richard cries ironically, as he introduces Bertha to the arty, fin de siècle apartment where he and Robert had plotted, drunk, and blasphemed years before (72). “It was to e the hearth of a new life,” he recalls (41). This world is still alien: when Richard musingly recalls something done “in our house,” Robert reminds him, “It is mine now” (40-41). A few moments later Richard again speaks of “our cottage,” and Bertha asks “Your … ?” “No, his,” he corrects himself. “I call it ours. The cottage I told you about so often—that we had the two keys for, he and I. It is his now” (50).

“I have won over Richard,” Robert tells Beatrice, early in the play, to which Richard does not respond. “We shall meet tonight.” “At Philippi,” says Richard. “The fatted calf will be eaten,” Robert declares jovially, thinking of dinner (44-45). Joyce mused, in his notes, “A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable on their return. The elder brother in the fable of the Prodigal Son is Robert Hand. The father took the side of the prodigal. This is probably not the way of the world—certainly not in Ireland” (Notes, 114).

Bertha's Irish nature is a little harder to perceive. The fact that the ancient female in Ulysses, who stands for Ireland and is sometimes named “Old Gummy Granny,” calls herself the “king of Spain's daughter” (Ulysses, 579-580), suggests a connection through Bertha's counterpart, the “Spanish beauty,” Molly Bloom. Joyce noted that “The two greatest Irishmen of modern times—Swift and Parnell—broke their lives over women” (Notes, 127). Richard has been associated with Swift. He sees the connection between his wife and her country when, at the peak of his frustrated rage, he throws Robert's newspaper phrase about him, “Left her [Ireland] in the hour of need” (99-100), at his wife. “Why, then,” she asks him, “did you leave me last night?” Richard replies bitterly, “In your hour of need” (102). Bertha's shrill anger at Beatrice, “The diseased woman!” (54) recalls Richard's Catholic mother's invective, “‘The black Protestant! The pervert's daughter!” (24).

It is certainly more than coincidence that Beatrice, the “black Protestant,” and Robert, typical ex-Catholic, are cousins and were once almost married. Robert mourns over the “asthmatic voice” of her father's chapel harmonium (30), which sounded the knell of his affair with her. Neither is comfortable in the other's presence, and a gulf of latent hostility still divides them. Beatrice's desiccation matches Richard's mother's relentless intolerance. These three, divided by squabbles like their native country, stand ranged in opposition to the artist-savior.

Richard's father, modelled upon Simon Dedalus, is no more than pathetic, but Richard has to fight against being overwhelmed by the debilitating sentimentality which he represents: “No, no. Not the smiler” (25). He must battle his mother's fierce spirit, yearning for her energy that he might defeat it in her. His guilt over his behavior at her death-bed suggests to him, as the “agenbite of inwit” does to Stephen, that he should have yielded to her values in return for her love, and out of love and pity for her.

When Richard makes his mysterious “sign of the cross upside down,” as he wanders, feeling defeated, by the seashore in the last act, it is a nightmarish, inverted exorcism of the Christian demons he thinks surround him (98). The fishwoman's cry, at the end, is probably an epiphany for Richard (though he does not show that he notices it). A noise from the swarming streets of Dublin, she suggests the disorder that seeks to overwhelm the shaping spirit. She may well be an old woman (we are not told), and remind us of the milkwoman and Old Gummy Granny; she may also recall the verse in Ulysses, “The harlot's cry from street to street / Shall weave old England's winding sheet” (34). Her product has Christian symbolic significance, and God, to Stephen, is “A shout in the street” (Ulysses, 35). After this point, Richard ceases to struggle; he says little, and collapses into a frustrated stasis in the last few lines of the play.

Exiles, then, clearly states a case. The hero, so long as he persists in the strained absolutism which the young Stephen had imagined to be appropriate for him, will continue to be isolated and impotent. His failure to achieve union with his wife and friends will be paralleled by a failure to make the slightest impression upon the nation whose savior he wishes to be. Exiles seems to explore the isolation of the lonely protagonists of Ulysses to an ultimate conclusion, a significant fact, I think, in view of the time when it was written; the play, dramatically, assumes that none of its people can or will change, although the hero certainly gains awareness, as he proceeds, of the implications of his position.

Whether Exiles implies that union will follow after its close is difficult to say. I am inclined to believe it does not. I do think we may look beyond the play, to Joyce's other works and their author, to discover that Richard will one day stoop to the earth, Antaeus-like, and arise, energized, to function in the midst of life. Maurice Beebe, after noting how like Richard Stephen is, in his aspirations for god-like sublimity and his symbolic “hydrophobia,” says “what Stephen has not yet learned … is that he need not fear participation in the life around him.” “Joyce,” he declares, “fulfilled Stephen's mission as artist and became … a participant in life.” Finally, he points out a significant one of Joyce's notes to the play: “Bodkin died. Kearns died [these are earlier lovers of Mrs. Joyce]. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me).” The last part of the note is triumphant: “I live in soul and body” (Notes, 118).¹¹

I do not think that the play predicts it, but I think we may be sure Richard will learn from his bafflement, and live to write, with Joyce, “I live in soul and body.”

Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of Joyce's archetypal Woman, her symbols and development, see Maurice Beebe, “James Joyce: Barnacle Goose and Lapwing,” especially pp. 303-306.

2. In Padraic Colum's edition of Exiles (New York). The notes are on pp. 113-127. Subsequent references to Exiles and “Notes,” cited hereafter in the text, will be to this edition.

3. This is William Empson's phrase, a good one, I think, except insofar as it implies a diminishing degree of importance in the lower “levels.” Mr. Empson notes that there are “little traps to force a member of the audience from his present level to the next one”; these are what I have been referring to as “symbol” and “suggestion.” See “The Theme of Ulysses,” pp. 44-45.

4. The “influence” of Ibsen is so striking in Exiles that it has been often analyzed, although without, I think, a proper sense of its function in the play. See, for example, James T. Farrell, “‘Exiles’ and Ibsen,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Givens; and Francis Ferguson, “‘Exiles’ and Ibsen's Work.”

5. To say this is not to deny the contention, in Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 69, that Joyce may have felt an unwelcome persistence of his old attitudes within himself, and that he wrote Exiles, in part, in order to work the last vestiges of it from his system. The play freed him, Mr. Kenner says, “from Ibsen the undernourished doctrinaire whose ‘wayward boyish’ pseudo-rigours of revolt had for some years compromised a portion of his spirit.” I am concerned only with the effect of Ibsen in the play, where I believe it “works” as a symbol. In the same way, I consider that the adulterous theme “works,” and thus that Richard Ellmann's brilliant exposition of the reasons why adultery had a personal meaning for Joyce, though it is of interest for its indication of the way the subject may first have come up for Joyce, is not pertinent to the play's interpretation. We have no evidence to deny that Exiles had a therapeutic value for its author, but, on the other hand, we have no evidence to the contrary, in the work itself. Joyce, I think, did not often lose control over his material. See “The Backgrounds of Ulysses,” p. 378.

   For Joyce's view of Ibsen's heroic role see his article “Ibsen's New Drama,” Fortnightly Review, LXVII (1900), p. 586, and his letter to Ibsen of March, 1901 (quoted in Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, p. 70), which includes such phrases as these: “What I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me …,” and “I give you greetings … joyfully, with hope and with love.”

6. Ellmann, “Background of Ulysses,” p. 385.

7. Perhaps we may compare Stephen Hero's declaration, about his new freedom, with this; he cries, “I feel a flame in my face—I feel a wind rush through me” (Stephen Hero, New York, 1955, p. 80). Stephen, at the climax of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, smashes the chandelier with his ashplant and plunges himself and the brothel into an appropriate darkness.

8. The dress is lavender (Exiles, p. 28). Cf. Leopold Bloom's musing: “Night sky moon, violet, colour of Molly's new garters” (Ulysses, p. 57).

9. It seems to me that we have enough evidence here, despite the usual association of Robert with Stephen, to separate the two figures entirely. To be sure, both Robert and Richard share the characteristics of the early Joyce and the early Stephen (who is, of course, a stylized self-portrait in the beginning). Exiles, by looking back to a time when both men shared the same ideals and aspirations, may well look back at a time when they were one; Richard, in a sense, meets himself going the other way in the play. The split, however, occurred very early, before the time when Stephen burned his “romantic” poems (Stephen Hero, p. 226). Richard bears Stephen's cold intellect, and Robert his romanticism and his euphemistic sensuality.

   The figure of Robert, Richard's “other self,” is in many ways the ancestor of the bourgeois, sensual, humbly human Bloom of Ulysses. He did not arise full-blown in Exiles, I believe, but is substantially the same person as Gabriel Conroy, the hero of the Dubliners story “The Dead.” Both Gabriel and Robert have pale complexions and dark hair, and both are neat and stout; they are both well-meaning, a little clumsy, and self-conscious. Each is a little dubious about Irish nationalism, but they are both busily involved in Dublin's world of affairs; Gabriel, to be sure, is a little younger, and his career as a journalist has just begun.

   Except that he is married to her in “The Dead,” the love of Gabriel-Robert for the woman is the same, characterized by damp sensuality and covered by romantic effusiveness. Gabriel's idea, that it is “better [to] pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion” (Dubliners, p. 283), foreshadows Robert's “The blinding instant of passion alone … is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life” (Exiles, p. 71). His sad awareness of himself as a “nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow” (Dubliners, p. 283) is like Robert's when he says, for instance, “If my best friend lay in his coffin and his face had a comic expression I should smile. With a little gesture of despair. I am like that” (Exiles, p. 64), and his remark, after describing his night with a slattern, “Are you disgusted?” (Exiles, p. 108).

   In his room at the hotel, Gabriel prepares to make love to his wife. The electric light is not working, and he asks that the candle be removed, so that the room is dark and the women stands illuminated by a shaft of light from the street; in Exiles the darkened scene at Ranelagh is identical, except that the shaft of light is pink. In both cases the woman is mourning for a dead lover. Gretta thinks of Michael Furey, “her buried life, her past. The dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration” (Notes, p. 118), and Bertha longs for her “strange wild lover”—not Richard, but that vision of him as he once was, the man she had loved nine years before who is lost to her now—while the rain which gave Michael pneumonia falls in a similar garden outside (Robert, for his part, will not catch pneumonia; he no sooner discovers the rain than he pops back in, comically, to fetch his umbrella (Exiles, p. 72).

10. Compare this portion of a letter Joyce wrote his brother, Stanislaus, from Trieste in July, 1905: “Give me for Christ's sake a pen and an ink-bottle and some peace of mind, and then, by the crucified Jaysus, if I don't sharpen that little pen and dip into fermented ink and write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me, send me to hell. After all, there are many ways of betraying people. It wasn't only the Galilean suffered that.” This is quoted in Gorman, James Joyce, p. 144.

11. “Barnacle Goose and Lapwing,” p. 320. The two previous quotations from this article are on pp. 317 and 312, respectively.